In one collage, a fish swims above a cherubic boy in a velveteen suit; behind them, a hand-tinted redwood forest rises impressively — a relic, perhaps, from an old postcard stand in Big Sur. In another, a turn-of-the-century Chutes and Ladders game board sets the stage for a tableau vivant: a Mexican bingo card of La Sirena, a gelatinous '50s-era dessert, two boys in kneesocks smiling for the camera, a pair of unzipped Levi's cropped below the crotch. Like his seminal body of poetry, John Ashbery's collages are what he calls a "mixed-media affair," teeming with the stuff of modern life, at turns lusty, comic, nostalgic, colloquial, and classically high-minded. Their elements constitute an impulse toward ephemera — postcards, magazine clippings, fine-art reproductions — that the poet and artist has honed over the past half century. As Ashbery himself recently stated, "We're all suckers for these appurtenances of daily life."

These appurtenances first took hold of him when he was a young boy in the 1930s. He grew up on an isolated farm in upstate New York where comic strips, radio programs, and Life magazine were his first "aesthetic experiences," he explained to me when I visited him in his apartment in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood, its walls hung with a mix of paintings (by Alex Katz as well as anonymous finds from antique stores), pre-Depression-era comics, and 19th-century Creil plates engraved with word puzzles." In 1936, Life magazine had a big spread on a Surrealist and Dada show at MoMA. After that, I became interested in Surrealism and collage."

At the same time, Ashbery discovered books on Joseph Cornell and Max Ernst at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, New York, where he took art classes. "Those Ernst collages made from magazine illustrations undoubtedly influenced my poetry. I realized that if you could make these wild associations of things in art, you could try it in poetry too." Indeed, Ashbery's poetry is renowned for its chatty obliqueness, and for its surreal, patchwork nature. In his poems, bits of speech, movie titles, references to paintings, and circular humdrum thinking, along with their attendant registers of tone, are arranged into elegant compositional wholes — just as they are in his less well known collages.

It was as an undergraduate at Harvard in the late '40s that Ashbery began collecting clippings and other odds and ends with a mind to use them in the artworks he made at night with his college roommate. This artmaking relationship would repeat itself — first, when Ashbery moved to Paris for a decade, where he worked as an art critic and remembers his French roommate also making collages, and later during his friendship with the artist and writer Joe Brainard. "Joe had a huge supply of old magazines. On my birthday in July, he would always send me an envelope full of either old postcards or things he had cut out to use in collages. He kept telling me I should do more."

Though he has made art on and off through the years, Ashbery didn't have his first show until last fall, at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York — which, in a neat twist, had published his first chapbook in the '50s. "Last year, the gallery owner said, 'I heard you've done some collages. Maybe we can show them,'" Ashbery recalls. "So I got a bunch of old magazines and stuff — I have an attic full of them — and I started working quite intensively. I turned my dining room into a studio, which is now just aisled with old paper."

Today, Ashbery's collection, most of it stored at his home in Hudson, New York, is vast. "I've always collected postcards," he reflects, noting that his time in Paris yielded many of them. "I found a wonderful place in one of those book stalls opposite Notre Dame. A grumpy old lady owned it, and she would shoo people away from looking at these strange American postcards. She would say, 'C'est seulement pour des collectionaires ici!' But I discovered how to get in her good graces; I'd say, 'Mais Madame, je suis un collecteur.' 'Oh, that's wonderful,' she'd say. "Go ahead.'"